


Under the Surface

by ncfan



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Animal Death, Blood, Childhood, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Switches between tenses for a single sequence, The author is from and lives in the Deep South, The author may have a tiny bit of an axe to grind, Triggers, the deep south
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 01:44:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11864055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: As it turns out, summer is not a pleasant time.





	Under the Surface

**Author's Note:**

> [CN/TW: Referenced child abuse, implied child abuse, blood, animal death, non-explicit violence, semi-explicit butchering of a dead animal.]
> 
> Note: I use present tense for dreams that are being explicitly described even if the rest of the fic is past tense, so there will be an incident of tense-switching in this fic.

He could hear birds fussing outside. Out in the cracked, crumbling parking lot, someone had dropped a couple of slices of bread. They’d already gotten mashed by somebody’s bike, but the birds couldn’t be bothered to care. A few crows had gathered around, tearing off bits of squashed bread with their sharp beaks. A mockingbird hopped around, screeching at the top of its lungs, flapping its gray-and-white wings at the crows. One of the crows turned round and squawked back at the mockingbird, only for the mockingbird to rush it, trying to tear at glossy black feathers with beak and talons.

That was just the way with mockingbirds. They’d attack just about anything when they were angry—their reflections in glass; people; squirrels; cats; other, larger birds. But it was just one mockingbird against four crows, and the crows quickly chased the mockingbird away. It perched on the railing of the wheelchair ramp, squawking indignantly.

It wasn’t long before the crows started squawking, too. Someone drove their car right over the bread, scattering the birds, while the bread stuck to their tires. The crows’ harsh cries were jarringly loud even through the grocery store’s shut doors, and Jonathan winced, eyeing the crows dubiously. These crows were much louder than Nana’s; he’d rarely heard them sound so angry, not even at feeding time. The only time they got so loud or so wild was when Nana—

Nana.

Jonathan turned around, an apology ready at his lips, but Nana was still talking with Mister Reed in the produce section. She hadn’t noticed him dawdling when he was supposed to be looking for the stuff on her grocery list. He relaxed a little, and turned away from the door.

The air conditioning wasn’t working quite right in the store today, though that hardly made it unique; the gas station convenience store had been sweltering when Jonathan had gone in to pay for gas. The fans were whirring overhead, but the air was thick and muggy. The odor of stale sweat clung to the store clerks’ clothes, though there were no visible stains. When Jonathan went to the shelves closest to the door, the boxes felt… soft. He tossed them in his basket anyways; there weren’t any close by the door that _didn’t_ feel soft, and Nana hadn’t said to find dry boxes where there weren’t any.

Up and down the rows he looked for what she wanted. Most of it, Jonathan found easily, and he just as easily avoided anyone he came across who might have thought they had business with him. There were only three people around here he would have liked to talk to, and they were all out of town. Rhonda Brown was with family in Columbus; Michael Jacobs, in Birmingham.

Missy Fletcher had been whisked off to bible camp as soon as school had let out for the summer. Where exactly, no one knew; her parents were being very close-mouthed about it. Missy had come to school those last few weeks twitching and flinching, cringing away from every touch, her eyes constantly threatening tears. It was hardly a look Jonathan was unfamiliar with, but he never knew what to do about it. He frowned, drawing a sharp breath. He wished he knew where she was, or at least when she was coming home.

There was no one in town Jonathan really wanted to spend time with, and nowadays there wasn’t anywhere in town he’d have liked to spend time by himself. The local library had closed, moving its books to a new location further away than Jonathan was allowed to walk or ride his bike. The school libraries were too far away as well, and it being summer, they were all closed. That he’d finally have access to the high school’s library was little consolation.

Mister Reed was heading away from the produce section when Jonathan looped back around that way, so he started off-loading groceries into the buggy, avoiding his great-grandmother’s gaze.

“Did you find everything?” Nana asked as he finished up, tapping her fingernail against the handlebar.

“They’re out of the vinegar you like.”

She pinched the bridge of her sharp nose and sighed. “We’ll have to go into Americus,” she muttered. “Come along.”

They drove out of town in silence, past the abandoned library, past the hardware store that had burned down last year and stood in blackened, molding ruins still, past the row of crepe myrtles that had been cut down almost to stubs. Nana had the pinched, intense look on her face that she got when she was contemplating something, and Jonathan fiddled with the air conditioning vent rather than risk interrupting her and drawing her attention. Interrupting people was rude, after all. At least when they got home and it was time to weed the vegetable garden out back, there was no chance that gaze would fall on him then; she’d finally decided his work was good enough to be done unsupervised, even if it was obvious Nana wished she still had the stamina required to tend to her plants herself.

(And even if she still watched him like a hawk when it came to watering the flowers and pulling weeds from the flowerpots, ever since that time he’d accidentally drowned her bluebells. That had not been a good day, and though Nana’s strength might have waned, there was nothing wrong with her memory—she was not about to forget bad days.)

“You’re going out with Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor tomorrow morning,” Nana said suddenly, her eyes still fixed on the narrow gray road in front of them.

“Nana?” Jonathan asked uncertainly, straightening in his seat.

She made an impatient sound in the back of her throat. “You’ve been moping around the house all summer, Jonathan, and I’m sick of it. If you can’t find something to do when you’re done with your chores, those two men’ll _give_ you something to do.” Her voice grew sharp. “You’ve still got your granddaddy’s shotgun, don’t you?”

“Yessum.”

“That’s ‘yes, _ma’am_ ,” Jonathan; just because you go to school with children who weren’t taught how to speak correctly, doesn’t mean you have to talk like them. Now, Mister White has been having problems with wild hogs coming after his crops. He’s letting hunters, Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor—and you, now—onto his property to get rid of them for fifty dollars a head.”

Well, that explained why Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor were getting involved; that the two men were seeking extra cash was not much of a secret in town or in church. Hog-hunting was a favorite pastime for men around here. There was no hunting season, no limit on the number of hogs you could kill, and it wouldn’t be the first time Jonathan had heard about a farmer paying hunters to come onto their land and kill all the hogs they could find (Though prices were better when it was one of the rich plantations in the next county over). Himself…

It was going on two years ago that Jonathan had found his grandfather’s shotgun. It had been another slow summer day, and with chores done and nothing else to do, Jonathan had decided to amuse himself by looking through one of the hall closets upstairs at home. The little island of second floor that hadn’t been boarded up had several hall closets, all of them stuffed full of odds and ends that had nowhere else to stay and had a musty-mothball-reek as the only point of commonality. He liked to go looking through the closets when Nana wasn’t watching; he had found some interesting things there, books, board games, photos of people who didn’t feature in the photo album or the table laden down with framed photos downstairs.

Anyways, one day, he found not a book, not a board game, not an old photo, but a shotgun. It was buried under where an upper shelf had broken and the quilts sitting on it had spilled. He’d felt the barrel before he could actually see it, and pulled it out of the closet just as Nana came along to see what the racket was about. She’d scolded him for going snooping, of course, and for making a mess, but when he’d asked if he could learn how to shoot, she’d been, well, much more amenable to the idea than Jonathan would’ve thought. That she taught him herself instead of getting one of the men from church to do it was more than a little unexpected; Jonathan had never known whether to be pleased by it or not.

But shooting was _all_ Jonathan had done with what had been his grandfather’s old shotgun. He’d never hunted with it; the only things he shot were targets and old cans. He’d never had any interest in shooting animals, and no practice, and he didn’t _need_ practice to know that hitting a moving target would be a lot harder than hitting a stationary one.

It had all been decided already, though, so he nodded slowly. “Okay. I’ve still got plenty of shells.”

“Good. They’ll be by at eight tomorrow morning to pick you up, so don’t forget to get up early.”

“Nana, how long—“

“For as long as they need you, boy. And don’t think this gets you out of doing your chores.”

It had all been decided already. Jonathan turned his head and stared out past the fields to the shadowed tree line beyond. No use pointing anything out.

-0-0-0-

Morning arrived with blazing heat that settled over the countryside like a wool blanket, with no breeze to relieve it. The sky was partially obscured by a ragged mass of dark clouds that simply hung in the sky, rather than thundering or even swirling. Whether rain was coming or not, who could tell? Jonathan had certainly heard plenty of people complaining about the effects this summer’s dry spell had been having on their lawns, their flowers, their crops, but the clouds had done nothing more than threaten rain over the past couple of weeks. Their temperament was a pretty good match for the people they hovered over.

“You put on sunscreen?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Take your hat. A jacket, too.”

“Nana, the radio said it’d be—“

She eyed Jonathan frostily, effectively shutting him up. “I don’t care how hot it’s going to be; you’re _not_ spending all day outside without a jacket, unless you just _want_ to get a sunburn if the sunscreen wears off.”

“Yessum.” Her frosty stare sharpened to a glare, and he winced. “Yes, ma’am.”

As a rusted truck pulled up the long gravel drive to the house, Jonathan found himself hustled _out_ of the house, with barely enough time to grab his lunchbox or his shotgun. “Don’t you give them any trouble,” Nana told him as he headed out the door and down the front steps. He could feel her pale gaze boring into his back.

Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor were heading for the house at the same time that Jonathan was leaving it. “Put your lunchbox in the cooler in the bed, Jonny,” the former said as Jonathan passed them by. “Just put the gun in the box next to it.”

As Jonathan climbed into the truck, he heard his great-grandmother severely ask, “Now, there isn’t going to be any _drinking_ out there, is there?” He didn’t know whether to smirk or groan. It was probably going to be a few minutes before they left, now.

He wouldn’t be waiting alone. A large bluetick hound whose collar read ‘Lucy’ sat on the floor in between the front and back row of seats in the cab; she wagged her tail as Jonathan took a seat, looking up hopefully at him. Ten-year-old Isaac Reed sat behind the driver’s seat, reading a book; he looked up from it to wave cheerily. “Hi, Jonny.”

“Hey, Isaac,” Jonathan muttered as he fastened his seatbelt. Lucy the bluetick hound sat up and gave his hand an exploratory lick; he patted her head absently.

“So you’re coming hunting with us, too?”

“Looks like it.”

The faintly wry smile that appeared on Isaac’s lips gave Jonathan pause, if only for a moment. But soon, sure enough…

“Why’re you wearing a jacket? It’s gotta be ninety outside!”

 _And only eight o’clock, too_. “Nana said I had to,” Jonathan explained, not quite meeting Isaac’s gaze.

Isaac nodded seriously, then asked, “Okay, but why does it smell like that?”

“That’s mothballs you’re smelling, Isaac.” This wasn’t new. Pretty much anything that stayed in a closet or a wardrobe anywhere in the house was gonna wind up reeking of mothballs after just a few hours. Isaac had not spent his life up to this point constantly congested, so there was no reason why this should have been new to him.

“And why’s it so big? My _dad_ could fit into that.”

For a moment, there was nothing in the whole wide world Jonathan wanted to do quite as much as hit his head against the passenger-side window. Hard. Maybe the resulting brain damage would make the question Isaac had asked him less aggravating than it had been the last fifty times someone had asked him something like it. (Somehow, though, Jonathan doubted it would help too much. He wasn’t that lucky.)

Thankfully, Jonathan was spared the need to either respond or try to give himself a splitting headache by Isaac’s father and uncle piling back into the truck. “You boys ready to go?”

Jonathan fixed a smile that he hoped didn’t look too plastic doll-like to his face. “Yessir.”

While Isaac chatted with his father and Mister O’Connor chatted with his brother-in-law, Jonathan sank into his seat, tugging at the sleeves of his jacket in an attempt to make them go down to his wrist, but to no avail. He bit back a sigh. At least Isaac hadn’t… Well, maybe it was because they went to the same K through eighth grade school, but weren’t close enough in age to have ever attended any of the same classes, or gone to recess on the same portions of the playground at the same time. Neither of them knew what the other’s classmates called them behind closed doors. Many of them went to the same church, but Jonathan’s great-grandmother was there, and even the most self-assured of classroom bullies knew better than to draw Mrs. Keeny’s gimlet stare on Mrs. Keeny’s turf.

They drove north on the narrow road, gray and crumbling and streaked with red tire tracks, the party (dog included) wincing every time they hit a pothole. Most of the land on either side of the road was given to farmland, interspersed with forest. The ditches likely hadn’t been mowed any time in the last decade, and were choked with weeds and kudzu and morning glory; the low fences around some patches of forest looked more like trellises. Even with the lack of rain over the past couple of weeks, it was still summer; the world was dressed in leaf-green and flower-blue and flower-pink.

When they reached Mister White’s farm, Jonathan sat up, peering out the window. The property on which Mister White’s farm resided had once belonged to the Keeny family; it had been one of the first properties to be sold when their family’s wealth began to dwindle. Jonathan had only been on the pecan orchard here; Mister White let some of the local kids help him pick up pecans in the fall in exchange for a bag of pecans to take home. He’d never seen any of the property beyond the orchard and the house, not the fields, and not the tract of woodland now in Mister White’s possession.

Was there anything interesting back there? Some of the older kids liked to spread rumors about whose daddy and whose uncle had a still out in the backwoods. Well, this was definitely the backwoods, and there were plenty more things than just rumored stills to keep an eye out for in the woods.

He’d find out soon enough. Mister Reed parked the truck out by the shed nearby the house. Mister White was there, tinkering with his tractor, and he nodded, looking uncharacteristically glum, as the two men, two boys, and bright-eyed dog passed him by. “Just head out back, boys,” Mister White called to them. He shook his head tiredly. “You’ll see what I’ve been talking about.”

A small stand of trees separated the house from Mister White’s fields. Azalea bushes were growing wild there, some nearly as tall as the hydrangea bushes out around the back of the house Jonathan shared with his great-grandmother (But not nearly as good for hiding in, he thought; compared to the hydrangeas, they were a little scraggly). The azaleas didn’t seem to get much watering; their scarlet blossoms were visibly drooping, the fringes of their petals turning brown and brittle.

Off to the side, seemingly almost as an afterthought, there stood a burial plot, fenced-off and abandoned. The weeds and thistle plants were grown so high that only the tallest headstones could be easily spotted over them. The plot was overrun with hard, red anthills that came up almost to Jonathan’s knee. A stone cross laid in pieces on the ground, crested with moss and surrounded by a patch of violets. The graves were so weather-beaten and patched over with moss that on most, the names and dates could no longer be made out; the slab on a raised tomb had caved in, and a holly tree was growing up through the breech. Jonathan winced at the sight of it, but said nothing; no one else made comment, and his stomach knotted in embarrassment at how grateful he was for their silence.

Past that there were Mister White’s fields, and… Oh. Oh, dear.

Mister O’Connor whistled. “Ernie wasn’t kidding when he’d said they’d come down like locusts, huh, Glenn?”

Mister Reed nodded. “Must be a mess of hogs in the woods. We’ll make a killing, that’s for sure.”

Off the back of someone who was probably gonna have to strain to make ends meet this year. The field… Jonathan couldn’t rightly tell _what_ it was Mister White had been growing there, before the hogs had descended. All that was left of the field was torn leaves and bits of roots lying scattered on upturned red earth. A scarecrow stood an ineffectual watch in the center of the field. Scraps of tattered flannel dangled from the crossbeam, the rip for its mouth in the burlap head gaping as if locked in a silent scream.

Nana had been beside herself the last time the deer had come nibbling on her flowers and the plants in her vegetable garden (Scarecrows weren’t any better at keeping deer away than they were hogs, though the fence around the vegetable garden did at least keep the deer from getting to all of it). She’d been beside herself, and she didn’t rely on the vegetables in her garden as a source of income. No wonder Mister White had looked so glum; he’d have to start all over again.

“Yeah, a mess of hogs,” Mister O’Connor repeated, smiling. “Waitin’ for us to find them. Let’s get a move on.”

Come eleven o’clock, no one had succeeded in finding a single, solitary hog. Lucy had managed to scent and scare the living daylights out of an armadillo and three deer (and had to be grabbed by the collar to keep from chasing the former into a particularly dense patch of kudzu), but no hogs. Lucy seemed to be about as good at scenting hogs as Uno, Ino and Cumptico-Calico had been as guard dogs; she seemed significantly more interested in getting people to pet her than anything else. It did make her a lot friendlier than a lot of the other dogs Jonathan had known, though, so maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor might have been tramping all through the backwoods with the dog at their side, but Jonathan and Isaac were setting a much more sedate pace behind them. Isaac had brought his bird book from the truck, and was trying to match the birds he spied flitting through the trees against the pictures in the book. He had no shotgun, no hunting rifle, no bow, no hunting weapon of any kind.

“Jonny? Does that one look like a…” Isaac paused to read the title of the page he had the book open to. “…A cedar waxwing to you?”

Jonathan hadn’t paid enough attention to birds that weren’t crows or Canadian geese (mean things) to really know what a cedar waxwing was supposed to look like; he only knew about mockingbirds because they were the state bird (And also very, very mean). But he dutifully looked at the illustration, then at the bird sitting some fifteen feet above them in a nearby oak tree. He tilted his head and frowned. “I don’t think so.” He checked the page again, looking over the text. “And the book says cedar waxwings only come this far south for the winter. It sure ain’t winter here, Isaac.”

“Oh, yeah, it does.” Isaac smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Jonathan said, the words, if rote, still rising easily enough to his mouth.

When the weatherman had promised heat over the radio, he hadn’t been kidding. The air shimmered with heat, the kind that made you want to dig a hole in the dirt cellar floor and lie in it until nightfall, just to get some relief. Sweat had begun pooling under the collar of Jonathan’s jacket before he’d been outside an hour, and now he found himself having to wipe his forehead every other minute; sweat kept getting in his eyes and dripping down his glasses. His mouth was dry as dust.

“So…” Jonathan peered after Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor, neither of whom seemed to have noticed how far behind the boys were, for they never turned back to check. “Your dad and your uncle seem pretty excited about all this.”

“You bet,” Isaac replied, flipping through his bird book again and staring intently up into the trees. Whether he could make anything out through the kudzu in some or the wisteria trailing dry, dead blossoms in others, Jonathan had no idea. “Dad’ll be happy if he can find a lot of hogs. I heard him and Mama…” He trailed off, his mouth twisting in an ugly grimace. “I… I can’t talk about it.” When Isaac’s eyes raked over Jonathan’s face, their gaze was wary. “…I wasn’t supposed to be listening.”

Familiarity chafed against Jonathan’s skin with all the tenderness of steel wool. He nodded, and said nothing more.

Somewhere in the distance, crows were cawing, their harsh cries filling the air. It was all too easy to forget where he was. Jonathan’s eyes darted to the tangled vines of kudzu and wisteria, wondering if they could provide him with any real protection. His palms were sweaty in a way that had nothing to do with the heat, his heart hammering sickeningly fast against his ribcage, _rat-tat-tat_ , more the sound dry branches made when struck together than muscle pumping blood. Beaks and talons could tear through those vines, but maybe they’d lose interest before reaching him, maybe?

But these were wild crows he was hearing, and they were far away; even if they came over this way, they were more likely to fly away from a human than towards them. Jonathan’s lips curled back in a scowl, and if he couldn’t get rid of the weak feeling in his chest in an instant, he could at least scuff at the ground with his foot and remind himself that Isaac hadn’t noticed.

(It was funny, but if he could have sprouted wings and flown away with those crows, he’d do so in an instant. He thought it might be a blessing. How wonderful it would be to never touch ground again, to go live somewhere, anywhere else. But Nana would have called that kind of running away a sin. She didn’t tolerate people who ran away from responsibility; her eyes flashed at the very thought. Slowly, reluctantly, Jonathan’s thoughts drifted back down to earth.)

Thunder rumbled miles away, but never brought them rain.

-0-0-0-

It was a little past the middle of the afternoon when Jonathan was dropped back off at home, and the presence of two more careworn old sedan cars than usual, parked out on the gravel loop in front of the house instead of under the carport, could hardly escape him. Miss Sallie Baker and Miss Eula Vaughn, it looked like, two of Nana’s friends from church.

Jonathan’s brow furrowed as he stepped up on the creaking front porch. Nana would have told him if the visit had been planned out in advance; she was so particular about the way he looked and behaved in front of guests (on those occasions when he was allowed to share space with them) that he couldn’t imagine there being guests and his _not_ knowing about it ahead of time. And neither Miss Sallie nor Miss Eula really liked to drop by without scheduling a visit first—at least not at this house.

The front door swung open before Jonathan could even knock. Nana’s lips were pressed tightly together, her eyes glinting. She pressed a hand to Jonathan’s back as she ushered him inside. “Go upstairs and wash,” she said in a low voice, with an edge that was less steel than it was titanium, “and don’t come back down until I call you. Do you understand?”

It was to be banishment today, then. “Yes, ma’am.”

But the door to the sitting room was open, and almost as soon as they entered the foyer, there came a cry of “Well, look who it is!”

For whatever reason, Nana did not want Jonathan downstairs at the same time as her guests today. It could be the sweat stains darkening his clothes, the reek of it clinging to his skin, or maybe she just thought he’d embarrass her somehow. But having been spotted, there could be no question of heading upstairs quietly; Nana steered him towards the sitting room, where Miss Sallie and Miss Eula sat waiting on an old, over-stuffed couch.

Miss Sallie and Miss Eula were cut from much the same cloth as Nana, in many ways. When Jonathan and his great-grandmother went to church, it was practically a sure thing that they would be there as well, if they weren’t, that was a sure sign they were sick, and badly.  They spoke softly in company, and were never known to shout in public. Their houses were much the same, too, if rather smaller—filled with old furniture, photographs of dead relatives, and more than one boarded-up room.

“Hello, dear,” Miss Eula greeted him, a little shake of the head making her earrings shiver and catch the light in a burst of green sparkles. “We were just asking your nana how you had been.” Her bright, tinkling laugh carried an oddly brittle timbre as she remarked, “Goodness, I swear you’re getting taller every time I see you!”

“I’m fine, Miss Eula.” Jonathan could feel Nana’s fingernails digging into his skin through shirt and jacket both. He stood up straighter, but he could still feel her fingernails like little claws needling his skin. “Thank you.”

“I brought cookies for you and your nana,” Miss Sallie added, with a smile that matched glassy eyes. The rich purple of her blouse stood out in stark contrast with the faded, fraying brocaded upholstery of the couch she sat on, the yellowed lace curtains, the peeling paint on the piano in the corner of the room. “They’re in the kitchen, if you want some.”

“I—“

“You can have one after supper, Jonathan,” Nana said. “Now run upstairs.”

There was a sweet, fusty smell in that room that had nothing to do with air freshener or Nana’s perfume. Oh, fair, it was in the whole house, unescapable; Jonathan was always a little surprised that the mothballs in the wardrobe were enough to keep it from clinging to his clothes. But it was strongest in the sitting room, and Jonathan had never liked it. It would creep up to him during piano practice, clogging his nose and his mouth like a rag soaked in rancid perfume, sweet and old and rotting. He wasn’t exactly going to cry over being told to stay out of that room today.

As Jonathan began to trudge up the front staircase (or, rather, the _only_ staircase; Nana had had what had been the servants’ stairs back when there were servants in this house boarded up a year ago after she’d found several of the steps rotted out), conversation drifted to his ears. Sound carried fairly well in this house. If you spoke at a normal tone, you could be heard across whichever floor you happened to be on that the time; if you shouted, through the whole house. It was the normal kind of talk today, asking after relatives in other towns, your gardening, and how did that recipe turn out, anyways?

“Now, Mary, your young’un’s friends with that Fletcher girl, isn’t he?”

And then, there was something that stopped Jonathan cold.

As all the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, his great-grandmother’s silence grew more and more resounding. The grandfather clock in the hall below ticked out the time like a sledgehammer on concrete, loud enough to rattle in your bones. Jonathan didn’t dare turn around—what if someone caught him still on the stairs, and gawking downstairs, at that?—but he wished, suddenly, that he could see through the wall into the sitting room.

When Nana finally answered, it was with a strain of reluctance so palpable that Jonathan could likely have used it to make a new screen for the door to the carport. “I’m afraid he is. I don’t really want him hanging around her anymore—I certainly don’t want her hanging around _him_ ,” she added, and Jonathan could easily imagine the way her lip was doubtless curling back in a disdainful sneer. “But I don’t rightly see how I’m supposed to keep them apart at all hours. They go to the same school; her family attends our church.”

Miss Eula snorted. “Well…” The rest was incomprehensible, just loud enough that Jonathan knew she was still speaking, but far too quiet for him to make any of it out.

“Eula!” Miss Sallie gasped. “What a thing to say!”

“What a thing to say, indeed,” Nana said coldly. “If you have something to say about the way I’ve raised my grandson, Eula Vaughn, I would love nothing more than for you to just _say_ it.”

 _I shouldn’t be listening._ He strained his ears. _I shouldn’t be here._ His stomach churned, and he could easily imagine what Nana would say if she caught him, but Jonathan did not move an inch. He pressed his hand flat against the wall, not for support, he told himself, though his legs felt just a little like Jell-O.

“Now, dear, you know I didn’t mean anything by it,” Miss Eula soothed. “You’ve done remarkably well, considering the circumstances. It’s not as though he knew when he first started being her friend.”

“Worthless children seem drawn to this house like flies to a garbage can.” Nana’s tone was distinctly bitter. “Sometimes I wonder if someone dropped a magnet into the ground when the foundations were being laid down. I know _I’ve_ had to deal with more than my fair share of worthless children.”

Another long pause followed that. Jonathan held his breath, straining to hear even the slightest suggestion of noise. His heart hammered in his throat.

“It was different with Karen, wasn’t it, Mary?” Miss Sallie probed, with a hesitancy that came across clearly even to the eavesdropper on the stairs. “That poor girl got taken advantage of. I remember how heartbroken she was when that boy just left town in the middle of the night, couldn’t even be bothered to say goodbye to her. She cried for weeks, and when she found out she was pregnant… Well, that really isn’t the same thing.”

Several seconds passed before Jonathan realized he was scratching at the wall.

“Isn’t it, Sallie?” Nana asked in clipped tones. “That girl knew better; I didn’t raise her to act that way. And then she just ran away, and left me to take responsibility for the mess she had made.” Her voice began to shake, but whether with hurt or with anger, Jonathan couldn’t tell. He knew he should care about the distinction, but couldn’t find it in him _to_ care. “I didn’t raise her to run away; I _certainly_ didn’t raise her to shirk her responsibilities. But she still threw everything I ever taught her, every day I spent caring for her, right back in my face. Does a child who’s worth something do that, Sallie?”

These days, there was little evidence that Karen Keeny had ever even lived in this house, let alone that her grandmother had raised and cared for her here. Jonathan had gone hunting all over, and he could still count on one hand the number of things that he could say with any certainty had belonged to his mother. Her clothes, schoolbooks, old toys, they were all gone, given away or destroyed. Her name and birthdate was stitched into the underside of the patchwork quilt on Jonathan’s bed, but he suspected it remained primarily because a quilt like that took too long to make to just get rid of out of anger (And on the off-chance he was wrong, he’d never said anything to Nana about what he’d found). What shadow Karen Keeny might have cast had been mostly burned away, lingering only in places where light never touched. For all that she had raised and cared for her, Nana rarely spoke of her granddaughter.

Jonathan crept up the stairs as quickly and as quietly as he could, praying all the while that whatever was said next, he wouldn’t be able to hear it. He’d already gotten an earful.

-0-0-0-

Between the two of them, Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor were always going to catch a hog eventually. Jonathan had known that from the outset. It had taken the better part of five days, but they finally caught and shot one today, an old boar with a missing tusk.

Actually, the boar had come pretty close to goring Mister Reed with its remaining tusk before the two men had managed to shield it. They’d come on the boar unawares, as the men were descending a hill and the boys were a-ways behind. Lucy, though affectionate, had proven useless as a scenthound—she hadn’t realized the boar was nearby until she’d laid eyes on it, and then Mister O’Connor had to grab her collar to keep her from rushing up to the boar (Something that probably would have ended in her death; Jonathan could only figure she’d never been used to scent hogs before, for her to act this way).

Jonathan had come up over the hill just in time for the shot to make his teeth rattle. The boar had fallen barely two feet from where Mister Reed was standing, but when he looked up, his face, though pale, was shining. “You boys go tell Mister White to bring his truck around back here!” he crowed, while Mister O’Connor stared at him, white-lipped. “’Cause we’re all eating pork tonight!”

But the thing about getting usable pork cuts from a dead pig was that first, you had to butcher it.

Lucy was at the back door to the Whites’ kitchen, scratching and whining, and more than once Mister O’Connor or Mrs. White had had to go snap at her to settle down. She might be a lousy scenthound as regards to live hogs, but she could definitely smell blood and raw flesh, even over the sharp tang of lemon-scented bleach that permeated the kitchen. Jonathan wondered if he could sneak some of the meat out to her, or if Mister Reed would at least let her have a bone to chew on. She never got anything to eat when they were out in the woods, and it’d quit her fussing besides.

Lucy wasn’t the only animal who found the hog carcass appealing. Flies were buzzing all around the butcher’s station in the Whites’ kitchen, cutting great, lazy arcs in the hot, still air. They seemed to multiply with each passing minute; first there had been ten, but now there had to be at least fifty, and they had to be constantly waved away from the corpse.

Mrs. White eyed the butcher’s station grimly (she’d been volunteered to clean up by her husband) while Mister White glumly counted out dollar bills at the gleaming kitchen table. Isaac sat across from him, nose-deep in his bird book, studiously avoiding even looking at the hog. The boy’s hands shook a little.

Jonathan made for the door—Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor could probably butcher a hog just fine without him, and Lucy would probably stop trying to tear up the door if someone just paid some attention to her. But before he could make his escape, Mister Reed called out brightly, “Hey, Jonny, c’mere. I bet you’ve never cut up a hog before; I can show you how.”

As a matter of fact, Jonathan never had butchered a hog. He did not feel the lack of experience especially keenly. In fact, he did not feel as though it would be too terrible a loss if he _never_ got to butcher a hog.

He’d been told not to give them any trouble, though, and while Nana might not have expected Jonathan to be pressed into service as a butcher, non-compliance now would definitely be taken as ‘trouble.’ Biting back a sigh, Jonathan walked over to the butcher’s station, trying not to grimace at the thin stream of blood still trickling onto the white tile floor. The blood had a nearly overpowering stench this close, the sort of stench that hit the roof of Jonathan’s mouth with roughly the force of a freight train at full speed. He did not retch, nor even gag—he’d been raised _better_ than that, after all, but all the same, the smell made him a little light-headed. He tried not to look at the peeled-back hide, or the open, unblinking eye still in the eye socket.

Both men were smiling broadly as Mister Reed held out a knife in his blooded, gore-encrusted hand. “Come on, son, don’t be shy. I’ll tell you where you need to cut.”

Jonathan was surprised how similar the blood felt to water as he made the first incision. The reek gave the lie to that, of course, but the dead boar’s blood felt… thinner than he’d thought it would. The flesh made a sick squelching noise as he cut through it, bits of fat and muscle sticking to his hands; Jonathan found his breath coming out in short, ragged gasps. Flies clustered around his hands, crawling over the backs of his fingers. The boar’s dead eye stared accusingly at him.

“You’re doing good,” Mister Reed told him, smiling unconcernedly. “Better than I’d thought you’d be. I wasn’t sure how much you’d know about this, Jonny Keeny—“

“Crane!” Mister O’Connor hissed, staring at his brother-in-law in amazement.

Jonathan said nothing, his hands stilling momentarily.

“—being brought up as you’ve been,” Mister Reed went on, as though he hadn’t heard. “No offense to Mrs. Keeny, she’s a good woman, but—something wrong, son?”

Jonathan didn’t know what it was Mister Reed had seen on his face that would have made him ask such a question. He met the man’s gaze squarely, and if he hesitated before answering, it was because the flies were swarming around his face now and he didn’t want any of them flying into his mouth. “No, sir.”

Nana was, by the standards of every respectable person who knew her, a good woman. She was a good hostess, never turning away anyone who appeared at her door. She never missed church unless she was too ill to get out of bed or needed to nurse her sick great-grandchild. She always paid her tithe, always provided cakes and pies for church bake sales, and had taught children’s Sunday school classes for many years, until her health no longer permitted it; Jonathan could still well remember attending her class, listening to her extol the virtues of Job and Daniel.

She dressed appropriately for a woman of her age and social standing—the family’s wealth was much diminished, but her family was still a respectable one, and her appearance reflected that. She didn’t drink. She didn’t gamble. She was hard-working and thrifty. She never raised her voice where anyone in town could hear her, and neither did she talk about dirty subjects where anyone could hear.

When she was young, Nana had married a man who wouldn’t embarrass her family, and had been a faithful, dutiful wife for as long as her husband was alive, and afterwards. She had endured hardships, oh, yes. A dead husband. Dead children. A granddaughter she should never have had to care for, let alone by herself, and one who had turned out ungrateful and worthless besides. An awkward, homely great-grandson she _certainly_ should never have had to care for, let alone by herself. She had endured all of that, and she never complained, not where anyone in town could hear. Her life had not been easy, but you would never hear her complain.

Jonathan cut a few neat lines into the boar’s corpse. Why would anything be wrong?

-0-0-0-

The backwoods either wasn’t as full of hogs as Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor had thought, other hunters had gotten to them first, or they were just not looking in the right places. It had been a full eight days since Jonathan first started accompanying them on hunting trips, and that one-tusked boar had been all they’d even seen. The men’s frustration that their first stroke of luck wasn’t exactly translating into further luck in hog-hunting was starting to make them a bit snappish with each other and with Lucy. Every time the dog wanted to inspect a tree or a bush, Mister Reed would yank sharply on her collar and put her back on the trail; Jonathan kept waiting for the moment when she’d turn around and snap at him, and was always a little surprised when she didn’t. When one of the men sighed or yawned, the other glared at him and told him to keep his eyes open. The boys may as well have been made of air, except when they became inconvenient; then it was the rough hand on the shoulder yanking them forward.

In spite of all of this, Jonathan wasn’t exactly sorry that they hadn’t found a hog since that day in the Whites’ kitchen. Butchery wasn’t for him; staring into the unblinking eyes of a dead animal as he pulled out its intestines _definitely_ wasn’t for him. He was left with little to do during the day except walk, pet Lucy and be Isaac’s second pair of eyes for birdwatching (he wasn’t allowed to take books from the house out into the woods, for fear they might be damaged), but no dead hogs still meant no having to butcher dead hogs. It evened out nicely.

(Nana had at least cooked the pork cut the men had made Jonathan take back with him, had pressed on him even in the face of his objections. He would’ve sooner expected her to throw it out or feed it to her crows; he’d heard her carry on about people eating things when they didn’t know where they’d come from more than once, and carrying home pork that came from a strange pig seemed like the epitome of that. She’d wrinkled her nose at the odor of dead hog, told him not to come out of the shower until he stopped smelling like the inside of a slaughterhouse, and then, to Jonathan’s amazement, had taken the bagged cut to the kitchen and begun fishing out cooking utensils.

The pork, once cooked, tasted strange. Nana said this was a result of the different diet consumed by a wild hog; it had grown up eating different things, so of course it wasn’t going to taste like the pork they got from the grocery store. Jonathan thought it had more to do with the way the boar’s dead eye had stared at him as he cut out the hunk of meat he’d taken home.)

The sky had darkened to an angry gray over the last hour, the wind wailing forlornly through the trees off in the distance. The breeze closer by drifted through the dry leaves littering the ground, rattling hollowly. Maybe it would rain today, end the area’s dry spell; there were plenty of farmers who’d welcome some rain.

Rain was not to be their chief concern today, though.

_CRACK_

“Shit!” Mister O’Connor swore, blanching, he and his brother-in-law both brandishing their guns. Lucy began to howl; the birds in the trees shrieked and flapped their wings. Isaac jumped nearly a foot in the air, his book tumbling out of his hands. Jonathan stared around wildly, eyes wide.

A shotgun shell had whizzed through the empty air between where the men and the boys walked, sending up a shower of splinters from the pine tree it lodged itself in. There was no warning of any kind, just relative silence, and then ‘crack.’ Three men came running up the hill. Jonathan recognized one of them as Mister Templeton, who had owned the now-destroyed hardware store in town; the other two were strangers.

The two parties stared at one another.

Then began the shouting.

Two hours later, the shouting was still going strong. The backwoods venue having proven insufficient for their needs, the shouters had picked up and moved close to the Whites’ house, leaving the boys and the dog to watch from a distance, close to the neglected burial plot. Mediation having proven impossible without an outside perspective, the police had been called. Jonathan had perked up when he spotted Missy Fletcher’s father, Officer Fletcher, getting out of the squad car to talk to the five men, but for now, he was stuck over near the burial plot with Isaac and Lucy.

Stronger now was the wind, though it failed miserably at doing anything about the heat, which was fast becoming absolutely suffocating (It did at least get rid of the mosquitoes, so it wasn’t all bad). Jonathan watched the men shout and gesticulate while Mister White watched in consternation and Officer Fletcher nodded and rubbed at his forehead. They were far enough away that Jonathan couldn’t properly hear what they were shouting about no matter how much he strained his ears, though a few snatches of words occasionally came to him. _‘Son of a bitch’_ was by far the most common. If there wasn’t a chance that shouting might start translating into kicking or punching, it might have been funny. As it was, Jonathan just hoped it would be over soon.

Lucy pressed up against his leg, whimpering softly. Jonathan patted her back, wondering at the fact that she didn’t try to go running up to her owner, though given the amount of times she’d had her collar yanked lately, maybe it wasn’t so surprising after all. He rarely just went up to Nana, not unless she beckoned to him. The principle was easy to grasp.

Mister Reed’s dog found all this disturbing, but as for his son? Jonathan turned to look behind him, and his stomach swooped unpleasantly when he saw Isaac standing on top of the broken tomb in the burial plot, clutching the trunk of the holly tree in his hands and staring down into the darkness under the breech in the stone, his eyes shining.

“Get off of that!” Jonathan snapped, climbing onto the bottom rung of the old fence and waving for Isaac to get out of the burial plot. How’d he missed him climbing over the fence in the first place? Had he really been so absorbed trying to make out what the men were saying (shouting) to one another?

Isaac blinked at him in blank incomprehension. “Why’ve I gotta get down? I’m not hurting anything.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of what’ll happen if you go stepping on people’s graves? Unless you say you’re sorry, you’ll get haunted by the ghost of the person in the grave. Now get _down_ , Isaac.”

A place like that was a prime nesting spot for snakes, as well. If Isaac got bitten, Jonathan was sure it would wind up being his fault somehow. Better to deal with that now.

“Sorry,” Isaac said as he climbed over the fence, though Jonathan couldn’t tell if he was speaking to the grave or to him. Jonathan had no idea whether Isaac even believed in ghosts; while Jonathan had heard pretty much everyone he knew tell a ghost story at least once, most of them didn’t really believe in them. “So who’re these people?” Isaac asked, pointing back at the burial plot. “Do you know?”

Jonathan shrugged. “Just people.”

Kinfolk of his, a branch of the Keeny family that, according to Nana, had been disowned for ‘shaming the family name by consorting with trash and filthy women’ a little before 1900. Given that that branch had all moved out of the state and never returned right around 1900, the burial plot on this property had not been cared for since. Disowning kin seemed to be a common remedy for offenses of all kinds. Half of Nana’s relatives, both natal and affinal, were dead to her, though a conversation Jonathan had overheard when they attended the funeral of one of her Hightower relatives in Cordele made the question of just who had disowned who significantly murkier than she liked to make out.

Jonathan eyed the broken cross lying on the ground dubiously. If ghosts existed, and these weathered, moss-covered graves had ghosts attached to them, would they recognize him as their blood? The burial plot on the property where he lived was much better cared for than this one, the weeds regularly pulled and ant beds regularly sprayed. The grave markers there were neither covered with moss nor so weathered that the names could not be made out; the last time Nana had noticed the writing getting faint on one, she had paid to have a new marker set in its place. That had to be the sort of thing ghosts would notice, and likely not the sort of thing they’d be happy about.

Suddenly, Jonathan had an image of being haunted by the ghosts of his dead relatives, with them refusing to leave him alone until he did something about the state of their graves. They’d follow him into town, follow him to school, wait out in the churchyard while he was attending services, constantly pestering him. Never bothering Nana, because Nana wouldn’t budge for living relatives she’d cast off, and she certainly wouldn’t budge for the dead. Maybe they’d knock things off of shelves when they were angry. Jonathan imagined Nana’s mother’s transfer print pearlware and her grandmother’s hand-painted porcelain flying through the air and shattering on the walls; it would be funny, if only he wouldn’t end up being blamed for it.

He imagined, briefly, that when the ghosts weren’t too angry, they might tell him stories about their family. Family stories weren’t something Jonathan had heard too much of; Nana had no interest in going to family reunions, and not often did kinfolk come calling upon them here. Nana’s stories invariably centered around misbehavior and the consequences thereof; how the branch of the family represented by this plot had been disowned, why his mother had left him here so long ago, why they hadn’t gone to a distant cousin’s wedding. But in the event that he did wind up being haunted by dead relatives, he probably wouldn’t be lucky enough to get new stories out of the bargain. If they could tell he was kin of theirs, like as not they’d be able to tell he’d been born on the wrong side of the sheets. Disowned Keenys were still Keenys; who could bear that gladly? And ghosts would make the house crowded, anyways.

“Do you know a lot about ghosts, Jonny?” Isaac asked suddenly.

“A bit.” He’d read books about ghosts and ghost stories in the library when he met up with his friends and there weren’t any parents around to carry tales back home. Even slightly less than half-believing in them, Jonathan had still read every book about ghosts and monsters in the library, grabbing new arrivals as soon as they came in. Missy had teased him about becoming a ghostbuster when he grew up, which, given that Jonathan had never seen _Ghostbusters_ , didn’t mean as much to him as it might have. “Why?”

“I… just thought you’d know a lot about ghosts.”

“And why’s that?”

“Mmm.” Isaac scuffed at the ground with his foot before going on, “I’ve heard folks talking about your house. I’ve heard them say it’s haunted.”

Jonathan stiffened, his hand clenched on the strap of his shotgun. He hardly recognized his voice as he asked casually, “Yeah? What’re they saying?”

Isaac shrugged. “Just… things.” He wouldn’t meet Jonathan’s gaze. “Your house is really old, Jonny; big, too. Aren’t houses like that supposed to have ghosts in ‘em?”

“Well, we don’t. And who’s going on about the house being haunted?” Suddenly, the afternoon heat, already oppressive, became absolutely unbearable, pressing down on his shoulders like a yoke. Jonathan rested his hand on the top rung of the fence, clutching at the dry, splintered wood. “They the folks who talk about my granddaddy?” His voice was as brittle as the parched grass growing around the graves. “Or are they the same folks who tell tales about how my mama never _really_ ran away?”

At that, Isaac’s eyes snapped to Jonathan’s face. He shrank back from him, his eyes huge and his cheeks turning a dull crimson. “Sorry,” Isaac mumbled feebly.

Jonathan smiled thinly down at him. “I’ve heard what they say. And I’ll tell you that if Nana really did bury her under the hydrangea bushes, I’ve never found any bones.” Isaac was silent, and Jonathan sighed heavily. “Isaac, there ain’t no… There ain’t no ghosts in our house. Trust me, we don’t need them.”

“Sorry,” Isaac whispered.

“It’s…” Something like a scream welled up in his throat, hard and hoarse and shriveled from long silence. He bit down on it until it stopped beating against the roof of his mouth like a switch, and ground out, “It’s fine.”

After another half-hour, the shouting began to die down, and Mister Templeton and his friends stalked off back into woods. Jonathan hurried over to the house, trying to catch up to Officer Fletcher before he could get back in his car. “Officer Fletcher?” he called after him. “Officer Fletcher, wait.”

The policeman paused at the door of his car, looking at him in surprise. “Jonny? What is it?”

“I…” The fact that he hesitated was absurd. Jonathan had known his friend’s father since he was a little boy; he’d always been easy to talk to before. “I was wondering when Missy was gonna get home. She’s been at camp for ages; it’s been kind of boring with her gone.”

Officer Fletcher’s face darkened suddenly. “Melissa will come home when she’s ready,” he said stiffly. His nostrils flared, jaw working furiously. “You’ll see her when she’s ready to come home; don’t ask me about her again.”

He drove away in a choking cloud of red dust, while Jonathan stared at the car in bewilderment.

-0-0-0-

That night, the wind screamed and screamed as it vented its fury on the forests and the fields. The windowpanes rattle, the house trembled, and from time to time Jonathan felt the springs in his bed reverberate with the impact of the wind on the front of the house.

Nana had warned him that they might need to go down to the cellar. The quivering sliver of golden light gleaming under his door alerted Jonathan that she was still awake, perhaps reading, perhaps staring out the window, contemplating whether she should make the walk to go check on her birds. He’d known her to do that during inclement weather, even when lightning struck less than a mile away. (Personally, Jonathan often found himself hoping during violent storms that their rookery would blow open and they’d all fly away and never come back. It was always a little disappointing when the weather would clear and they’d still be here, cawing at the top of their lungs at the sight of a familiar face.)

It mattered little to him whether she went outside or not, so long as Jonathan wasn’t expected to go check on the crows _with_ her. If she blew away, he’d probably wind up going to live with some of his Swann relatives in Americus. (He wasn’t supposed to hope for that. He knew he wasn’t. The thought had come unbidden anyways.) He listened to the wind as he drifted off into an uneasy sleep, and dreamed…

Bees the size of rats drift lazily between each bright blue cluster of hydrangea blossoms. Blistering sunlight shoots through the cracks between leaves and petals like bullets out of a gun, burning what they touch, whatever they touch. Jonathan edges further back into the bushes, out of arm’s reach, his fingers digging little furrows in the dirt. A long shadow falls over the bushes; feet clad in worn leather flats pace back and forth outside. A voice like a thunderclap is calling his name; Jonathan presses his hand over his mouth and curls deeper into the shadow of the hydrangea bushes, not daring even to breathe.

The shadow melts away and Jonathan breathes a sigh of relief. She never can find him when he hides here, even if she looks everywhere. Small things that crawl under the hydrangea bushes are invisible there, and even when he is as tall as her and taller, she renders him so very _small_. Still, when she thunders by he wonders if she could rip the bushes up by the roots and leave him with nowhere to hide at all.

His skin is turning red where the sun touches it, oozing, weeping, peeling. A cluster of little shadows gather outside, stretching little hands through the tangled branches. “Come out and play,” they say. “They’re all gone now; come on out and play with us.”

“The sun.” Jonathan falters; the aroma of cooking flesh, at once mouthwatering and repulsive, fills the air. “The sun is burning me; I can’t.”

“If you fear the sun, then why not come with me?” As the little shadows disappear, something cool and dry wraps around Jonathan’s ankle. He looks to the earth, and his heart stops cold in his chest. A skeletal hand has reached up out of the ground, white bone gleaming in a flash of sunlight. He tries to jerk his leg away, but the hand’s grip only tightens, holding him down with a strength dry bones should never have possessed.

Jonathan watches, transfixed, as a sudden gust of wind blows all the dirt around the hand away, gradually exposing arm bones, then the other arm and hand. Then feet and leg bones, then the pelvis. The flowers are turning bluer and bluer, like an overexposed photo, brighter and brighter until they shine like stars come down to earth. Last of all, there lies exposed a ribcage and a skull.

Blind eye sockets, one empty, one full of winding roots, stare up at him, pinning his gaze there when Jonathan would rather look anywhere else. “What’s the matter?” The skull has no tongue, and its mouth can only hang open in a ghastly smile, but he hears a voice as clear as day. “Don’t you want to talk to me? Don’t you have any questions for me?”

Jonathan’s mouth works, but no sound comes out. Not so much as a breath of air is there to ease his burning lungs; his head is spinning, sight beginning to blur. Oh, his skin is burning…

“It’s alright, baby,” the skull croons. “You don’t have to say anything. Just come here. It’s been a long time.”

When Jonathan woke suddenly, a live oak branch was battering against his window. The light in Nana’s room had been extinguished; all the light that could be made out was a silver sliver of moonlight falling over his bed.

Jonathan scrubbed his damp forehead and rolled onto his side facing away from the window, trying and failing to keep from shaking. If Isaac Reed ever asked him about his house again, he was gonna get it.

-0-0-0-

Finally, _finally,_ the angry dark clouds and rolls of thunder had amounted to something; the local farmers were doubtless thrilled. In the early afternoon, just a little while after lunch, the rain finally started. It came fast and it came strong, coming down in silver sheets that pounded against the rooftops and soaked many a laundry line before the clothes could be taken inside.

The rain had yet to quit, or even abate a little. Lightning split the nearly-black sky in white forks that imprinted themselves on closed eyes for several minutes afterwards. The ear-splitting cracks of thunder made the very earth tremble.

Vacation bible school was being held at church this week. Since it’d start in just a couple of hours, and since there was less than no use trying to hunt hogs in this kind of weather, the men had decided to drop Isaac off early on the way to Jonathan’s house. That was how Jonathan came to find himself sitting on the front steps of the church, watching the rain pour over the side of the awning in great bursts, scratching Lucy’s ear.

Speaking of the dog, Lucy twisted her head around and pulled at her leash (tied to the iron railing) for the third time since Jonathan had gone out to sit with her. Apparently, cold red brick wasn’t the best thing to lie on. When the leash failed to come apart in her mouth, she turned her soulful brown eyes on Jonathan and whined.

“Sorry, girl,” he told her. “Nobody wants a wet dog inside. Besides, it’s much better out here.”

Isaac wasn’t the only kid who’d been dropped off here early; he’d gone off with the other kids as soon as he spotted them. Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor had run into some of their buddies, and had been chatting in the church lobby ever since. Mrs. Fletcher was here, setting up for tonight’s vacation bible school class. Her clothes were covered in blue glitter and she wore such a glassy, frozen smile that Jonathan didn’t dare approach her.

They all seemed so comfortable here, like nothing was wrong. Jonathan had never understood how anyone could be so relaxed at church, so untroubled. He’d been uncomfortable since they got here, his arms carpeted with goosebumps. He felt as though he’d done something wrong. Coming under the shadow of the church rarely failed to make him feel as though he’d done something wrong, though he rarely knew what, exactly.

_“It’s because you’ve sinned.”_

_“But I don’t know_ why _I feel like this.”_

_“You’ve forgotten. That’s part of the sin. If I were you, I would pray to the Lord right now and beg Him to help you remember.”_

_“But what if I can’t?”_

_“The Lord doesn’t forgive sins that go unacknowledged. You had better hope you remember, or you’ll answer for it when you die.”_

_“…Yes, ma’am.”_

Maybe it really was that he’d done something wrong, if he was the only one who felt this way here.

The door into the church swung open suddenly, banging against the rail. Little Crystal Strickland (six years old this spring, if Jonathan remembered correctly) came storming out, Isaac following a few steps behind. Isaac eyed Jonathan warily, hanging back by the door, but when Crystal spotted Jonathan, her eyes lit up. “Hi, Jonny! Can you help me with something?”

Lucy started her leash-biting routine again, presumably for the benefit of a new audience. Jonathan ignored her in favor of looking quizzically at Crystal. “What do you need?”

Isaac took a step forward, still keeping an eye on Jonathan. “Crystal—“

But she stuck her tongue out at him and asked Jonathan, “Is the water in the ocean _really_ salty? Natasha says it is, but I think she’s lying.”

Jonathan stared at her blankly. Umm, what? “Yeah, it is.”

Crystal rolled her eyes. “You’re just like Tasha. Have you ever even _seen_ the ocean?”

“Well, no—“

She grinned triumphantly. “Then how are you s’posed to know?”

“Because I learned it in school,” Jonathan snapped. He was starting to get the distinct impression that she hadn’t actually come out here because she wanted an answer to the question. All the same though, the last time he checked, this was pretty basic information, so why were they even discussing it?

The look on Crystal’s face became deeply pitying. “Oh, Jonny.” She reached forward and patted his shoulder consolingly. “That’s okay. Daddy says all the teachers at school are liars; they keep trying to tell people that the earth’s millions and millions of years old. I guess the teachers are just lying about the ocean too, huh?” She smiled suddenly. “Good thing I’m home-schooled!”

Jonathan considered telling her that the teachers at school were much better off without a kid like her darkening their doorsteps. He seriously considered telling her that her daddy was an idiot; even Nana didn’t think the earth was just six thousand years old, not in the face of overwhelming evidence pointing in a very different direction.

He considered it. He weighed the satisfaction of seeing the look on Crystal Strickland’s smug little face against the consequences—her going running crying to her mama, who’d pay an angry phone call to Nana about what he’d said to her baby—and decided it wasn’t worth it. Jonathan instead consoled himself with the knowledge that, in twelve years’ time, whatever passed for Crystal’s high school diploma would be so worthless that not even the evangelical colleges would take her.*

Crystal had apparently taken his silence as conceding the point, because she sighed gustily and said, “I’m bored. I wish we could just start vacation bible school _now_.”

A sharp smile rose to Jonathan’s lips. “If you’re bored, I could always tell you about Tailypo.”

Crystal opened her mouth, but before she could respond, Isaac said hurriedly, his eyes shining with alarm, “That’s okay!” and hustled a protesting Crystal off towards the covered walkway to the Sunday school building.

It seemed he had no real promise of solitude out here. Ignoring Lucy’s whines, Jonathan got up and went inside.

The sharp, prickly odor of the lemon cleaner used to wipe down the tables in the lobby greeted him first. Jonathan winced, pausing in the doorway until his eyes stopped watering. Once he became accustomed to the cleaner, the old, stale smell of dust was easily picked up from underneath, though Jonathan saw no dust, not even motes drifting through the air. Not exactly welcoming, those two smells.

Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor were still chatting with their buddies, standing so they were blocking the left-hand staircase up to the balcony. None of them seemed to have noticed that Jonathan had come inside. The double-doors to the sanctuary had been thrown open; Mrs. Fletcher and Mrs. Strickland were up on the chancel, behind the center pulpit and in front of the choir seats, going through boxes of supplies for tonight’s vacation bible school. Aqua-green and yellow streamers were draped over the side of the chancel. One of the doors in the back of the sanctuary stood invitingly open.

The moment Jonathan walked into the sanctuary, skirting the far right side as he was, he could feel eyes on him. Mrs. Fletcher and Mrs. Strickland were looking at him, sure, but that wasn’t all. Though there was precious little light outside for them to catch, the images in the stained glass windows on either side of the pews still showed up so very clearly. The eyes of Jesus and His apostles followed Jonathan as he walked by, narrowed in silent appraisal, and then (he was sure) disapproval.

As he neared the chancel, Jonathan could hear Mrs. Fletcher and Mrs. Strickland whispering to each other.

“Looking more like Karen every year, isn’t he?”

“Karen wasn’t ever that homely, Gloria, but I reckon you’re right. He’s just as jumpy as she was, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was in the same class as her; she’d jump a foot in the air if the teacher slammed his door on the way in. Got worse after she got, well, you know.”

Jonathan barely managed to get into the hallway behind the sanctuary without… He wasn’t sure what he would have done, if he’d had it in him to look up at the chancel, let them _know_ he could hear them. Something he’d have regretted once word got back home, that was for sure.

He knew perfectly well that he looked like his mother. He’d found a photo of her in the back of a hall closet once several years ago, a black-and-white school photo from when she was around the same age he was now. A girl with long hair and a long face, and bright, if somewhat nervous eyes. He’d seen her. He knew.

(Jonathan didn’t have the photo anymore, of course; Nana had found it. The day of discovery had come a couple of years ago, on an occasion when Nana had had him tip out the contents of his book bag for inspection. He’d been keeping the photo in one of his schoolbooks, and when she found it, when she recognized the subject, she froze. She looked at Jonathan in silence, her face betraying nothing. Mention of his mother normally provoked tirades—or his mother’s name came out _during_ tirades—but this photo produced silence that made Jonathan’s stomach churn more the longer it went on. Then, she took the photo and, still silent, fed it to her new paper shredder.

Jonathan could no longer remember just how he had reacted. He might have cried. He might have begged. He might have stood there and watched in cold, numb silence. Each seemed equally likely.)

After taking a few long, ragged breaths, Jonathan started down the narrow hall towards the very back of the church.

It always struck Jonathan how _quiet_ the church was when there wasn’t a service underway. No noise emanated from behind the rows of shut doors he passed. There wasn’t any singing or chanting echoing from the sanctuary hall. There came no screams of laughter from children playing outside. All was silence, but for driving rain pounding against the windows, but for thunder and lightning.

Being back here now reminded Jonathan not a little of the times he had snuck into the parts of the second floor Nana had boarded up. That long line of doors, always shut, never open. The still, musty air, as thick and stagnant as though it had been a thousand years since someone had last been there. The muffled silence of a space where no one lived anymore, the gloom of a place where no lights were lit, or would be lit. Jonathan half-expected that, the next time lightning struck and cleared all the shadows away, he’d see three or four or maybe five mousetraps scattered around, with dead rats lying rotting under the bar. He half-expected to see white patches of mildew on the walls like there was at home. He even felt as though he should be looking over his shoulder every other moment, listening for any sign that Nana had come home or that she’d realized where he was and had gone to drag him out.

The kitchen at the end of the hallway was empty. The counter by the fridge was laden down with plates of cookies covered in cling wrap, and there were splatters of what looked like spaghetti sauce, several days old, on the stovetop and the countertops on either side of it. As Jonathan walked over the floor, he found that more than a few spots on the floor were… sticky.

But he had no intention of waiting out his stay in the kitchen. The back stoop, just out the door on the far side of the kitchen, was a far more attractive spot, covered and secluded. At least the air wouldn’t be so stagnant.

Except, the back stoop wasn’t empty.

Jonathan first spotted her out of the window in the door, though from where she was sitting, he could hardly see who she was. Jonathan almost didn’t open the door; he had wanted to be _alone_ , after all, and if he couldn’t find solitude on the back stoop, there had to be an empty bathroom _somewhere_ in this church. But something in him, maybe some subconscious sense of recognition, pushed him to go out onto the stoop. If the girl wanted the stoop to herself, he’d just try to find an empty bathroom.

Opening the door removed any buffer between him and the incredible noise the storm created. The driving rain and crashing booms of thunder were, for the first few moments, almost deafening. The girl sitting on the stoop didn’t seem to hear Jonathan open the door, didn’t seem to feel the draught of cool air that would have hit her the same time the hot, muggy air hit him. She sat with her back turned to him still, staring off into the woods behind the church.

Recognition chose that moment to strike.

“Missy?” Jonathan tried, taking an apprehensive step closer to her. “Missy?”

Nothing. It _was_ Missy, he was sure of it, finally home from bible camp—though just from the way her dad had talked, Jonathan hadn’t expected to see her again so soon. It was Missy, who his great-grandmother didn’t want him around anymore, whose parents had been acting… weird, lately.

“Missy?” Jonathan finally took a few steps forward, leaning down to touch her shoulder lightly. “Melissa?”

It was that touch that finally alerted Missy to his presence, and violently. She yelped, practically jumping a foot in the air before whirling around to look up at him. “Jonathan?” she spluttered, hastily brushing her frizzy brown hair out of her face. “You scared me!”

Jonathan didn’t answer her right away. He stared down at her face, taking in how puffy and bloodshot her dark eyes were, how red and blotchy her cheeks and nose were, the glittering tracks on her face. He forced himself not to comment, and instead muttered, “S-sorry. I… didn’t think you were back home; last I heard, you were still at bible camp.”

“Some buildings caught on fire,” she told him. Jonathan could pick up, easily, on just how scratchy and hoarse her voice was, and wished he couldn’t. “We had to go home. I just got back yesterday.”

“Oh.” Jonathan rooted around in his head for something, anything to say. Finally, he asked lamely, “Was it nice at camp?”

She didn’t answer for what felt like an eternity, her face frozen. Then, Missy smiled tremulously. “…Yeah… Yeah, it was.”

Jonathan went to sit down beside her, brushing glossy magnolia leaves and dry, brown magnolia petals out of the way as he did so. He didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t known what to say years ago when they’d hide during recess, waiting for the playground tyrant of the (half) hour to get tired of the swing set or the jungle gym, and she’d ask him if he thought any of those long line of tyrants would ever be nicer to them. He certainly didn’t know what to say now.

“Has anything happened since I left?” she asked, staring out at the tree line where the cluster of chinaberry and Persian silk trees† were trembling in the wind.

“Shoot, Missy; nothing ever happens around here.”

She looked sideways at him, her eyes narrowed. “Anybody died?” she asked slyly, the faintest suggestion of a smile playing on her lips.

Jonathan choked out a laugh, the warmth of it almost alien. “I don’t think so. Ain’t seen any signs about estate sales.”

Her smile lingered, brighter for the flash of teeth and the mirth still present in her eyes. “So how’ve you been?”

“Okay, I guess. _Bored_. There ain’t nothing to do around here with the library gone, and Nana’s making me tag along with Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor when they go hunting.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Sounds like loads of fun. They gonna get their animals stuffed after they kill ‘em?”

“No. They’re just butchering them for their meat.”

“Good.” Missy grimaced. “We’ve already got enough of those at home.” As Jonathan recalled, Missy was less than fond of taxidermy. On the occasions he’d been in her house, he’d seen a stag’s head mounted over the fireplace, and seen that his friend could barely stand to go in the living room, let alone look at it.

Jonathan raked his fingernails against the rough stone of the back stoop until he remembered something. “Hey, Missy, have you seen the book list the school put out for the ninth graders yet?”

“Yeah, I have. They all look boring.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Did you notice _Anthem_? That Ayn Rand book?”

“Yeah. Honestly, that one doesn’t look any—“ she paused, her eyes widening. “ _Oh_.” Gingerly, she asked, “How _did_ Mrs. Keeny like that?”

Jonathan smiled bitterly. “She just about hit the roof. She started writing a letter to the school until Miss Eula convinced her it wouldn’t do any good.”

Missy’s shoulders shook with repressed laughter. “So I guess we’re still gonna be hiding your library books in my locker this year?”

“I guess so. I—Hey.” Missy was leaning back a little, propping herself up on her elbows. As she did, her shirt sleeve fell back from her upper arm, and Jonathan spied a healing, green-and-yellow mottled bruise that stretched all around her arm. He lifted his hand close to her arm, careful not to actually touch the bruise. “Missy, how’d you get that bruise?”

All at once, her demeanor changed. Her shoulders stiffened, and the smile vanished from her face. “Don’t touch it!” she snapped, jerking back from him. “It’s nothing, I just—“ she drew a shallow breath “—it’s nothing,” Missy muttered, staring down at the ground.

“O-okay.” Jonathan clambered to his feet, his heart starting to pound. Suddenly, the stoop didn’t feel like a refuge anymore; it was a simple hiding spot now, and the attendant feeling of being hunted made Jonathan long for the inside of the church, as uncomfortable a place as it was. “I… I’ve gotta go back inside,” he mumbled. “They’re gonna be looking for me before long.”

But before he could, Missy’s hand shot out, closing tight around his wrist. “Jonathan.” Her voice was level, but panic shone out of her eyes. “Don’t tell my mama I was crying.”

“I—“

“ _Don’t tell her_. Please, don’t.”

He didn’t meet her gaze; his eyes were fixed on her arm. “……I won’t. I promise.”

Her hand fell limp at her side, and Jonathan hurried back inside, a scream building in his throat that he could only swallow back bitterly.

-0-0-0-

After the initial torrent, it rained off and on for several days, never letting up for more than a couple of hours at a time. When Sunday came around and the storms were still raging, Jonathan and his great-grandmother went to church and listened to stories of dirt roads washing out, trees falling on people’s driveways and cars, the creek bursting its banks and flooding out a couple of the houses close by.

Missy was there, stiff and silent, sitting next to her parents. She didn’t go off to Sunday school. She didn’t say hello to any of her friends, and none of her friends said hello to her. She stared off into space during the sermon, her eyes glassy.

Once the service was over and the congregation began to filter outside into the pouring rain, Jonathan started to go over towards Missy. There was always a chance it would get him in trouble, but this time, he thought it might be worth it. But before Jonathan could steel himself enough to take more than a few steps, Nana spotted him moving away from her and apparently guessed where he was going. She clamped a hand down on his shoulder and shook her head.

“Nana…”

“We’ll talk in the car,” she said shortly. “Now come with me.” She steered him out of the church before he could try to steel himself again.

Regardless of the impact of the weather on the landscape and the local community, as soon as the skies cleared, Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor began driving their truck over to the house in the mornings to pick Jonathan up. There was money to be had if they shot those hogs, after all.

Jonathan found himself lagging a fair ways behind the rest of the party, the men and Isaac holding up the front, Lucy rambling aimlessly around, sniffing at every tree and bush. Isaac had started sticking closer to his father and uncle when they went out in the woods, and since the men seemed to have finally admitted to themselves that Lucy was completely useless as a scenthound, they were letting her do as she pleased.

They were letting Jonathan do as he pleased as well, if ‘pleased’ was really the right word for it. After a few hours of this, he was beginning to wish Isaac still wanted to walk with him when they were out in the woods, if only because being stopped to help identify birds was better than just wandering around with nothing to do.

He paused to mop his forehead, biting back a sigh. The rain, long-lasting as it was, hadn’t done anything about the heat; just a few hours out here and he already felt like he was going to melt. And the rain had only added to the humidity, to the point that Jonathan felt as though he was breathing soup.

 _I don’t understand why anyone would want to be outside during broad daylight. I could understand if you had to go_ work _outside during the day. I could understand having to go somewhere during the day_ —he’d ridden his bike into town during the day often enough, after all— _but why would you_ want _to be out here? I know you shouldn’t go hunting hogs in the dark, but seriously?_

Isaac, his father and uncle had walked on far ahead, shrinking into the distance. Lucy could be heard barking, but Jonathan didn't see her anywhere. Given a few more moments of rest, Jonathan knew he was going to have to try to catch up to them a bit; he wasn’t sure he knew the woods well enough to keep from getting lost if he had to try to get back to the Whites’ house by himself. Just a few more moments.

Jonathan didn’t notice, at first, when the growth of kudzu nearby began to rustle. The woods were hardly empty. Even when you didn’t have to deal with other hunters accidentally shooting in your direction, there was still deer, armadillos, quail, rabbits and the like. Jonathan was just waiting for the moment when he’d come across a group of obviously _very_ lost Boy Scouts.

Except it wasn’t a deer, or an armadillo, or a quail or a rabbit. It wasn’t even a (very lost) Boy Scout.

 _…Oh_.

When he saw the boar emerge from the kudzu, Jonathan froze. He had his shotgun, but when he went to lift it, his arms were as lead, fumbling at the trigger and barrel, struggling even to lift it up to fire.

The boar, when it saw him, stiffened, a low snarling noise tearing from its snout. It chomped its mouth, the click of teeth against teeth like a hammer on an anvil. It shifted its weight from foot to foot.

He felt giddy. Why was the gun so heavy? It was nothing to shoot a target. Why…

Jonathan hefted the shotgun just as the boar began to charge. He fired, and the bullet flew wide of the mark. There was no time to reload. Before he could even dig another shell out of his pocket, the boar was on him.

Jonathan’s memory of the incident was never particularly clear. All of it was colored by the agonizing pain in his leg, the copper reek of blood that became the only thing he could smell even as his blood roared in his ears. He pushed feebly at the boar’s head, trying in vain to shove it away from him.

Beyond that was nothing but fragmented sounds and images. The boar’s wild eyes, the foam dripping from its jaws. Furious baying as Lucy raced towards them, snarling as she attacked the boar, then whimpering, then silence. A gunshot, and sunlight that was punctuated with black swirling spots cutting through the trees.

Upon being carried out of the woods, Jonathan was taken directly to the hospital in Americus to have his leg treated. He got stitches, bandages, crutches, and more shots than Jonathan thought he had ever received at one time in his life. Reality was recoalescing, and Jonathan was feeling every ache, every bruise and cut, every pulled muscle and all the wounds that had needed stitching. The painkillers the doctors had given him didn’t numb the pain enough to let him not think about it.

Lucy was not as ‘lucky’ as Jonathan had been. While he was being sped away to the hospital in an ambulance, she was bleeding to death on the Whites’ kitchen floor, snapping desperately at anyone who came close to try and comfort her. Everyone knew stories about dogs who had saved their humans from such threats as hogs and worse, but no one ever talked a lot about this. When Isaac told him about it later, Jonathan felt sick.

Mister Reed and Mister O’Connor were all shaking hands and stumbling apologies in the hospital. The nurses were kind and consoling. Even Nana, who had followed after the ambulance in her car, spoke gently to him once he’d been given all his stitches and his shots, more gently than Jonathan had heard her speak to him in years.

“Doctor Jackson tells me you’ll be able to go leave tomorrow,” she said to him, giving his hand a tight squeeze. “They just want to monitor you overnight; it’s nothing serious, I’m told. I’ll be back tomorrow morning to take you home.”

It had taken him forever to recognize that soft tone for what it was. Once, hearing her speak to him that way would have made his heart clench with hope. In the hospital, he just stared at her numbly, and barely knew to be grateful when Nana attributed it to blood loss and pain medicine.

The next morning, Jonathan was silent as his great-grandmother and one of the nurses loaded him into the former’s car. Nana didn’t try to talk to him as they drove home, and Jonathan said not a word to her. There was a moment that kept replaying in his mind, something that didn’t bear repeating to others. There had been a moment, the split-second between the missed shot and the boar’s tusks driving into his leg, when the sweat on his palms, his heart beating against his ribs, panic coursing through his veins, had translated into something like euphoria. He didn’t know why; everything after it was a jumble, after all, and Jonathan wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to sort it all out. But everything after it felt just a little unreal.

It didn’t matter now. He was home. Jonathan drew a deep breath of the stagnant, fusty air, and tried to forget it, tried to ignore how much closer the walls seemed since yesterday.

**Author's Note:**

> * Characters’ views on homeschooling do not necessarily reflect the author’s. I have nothing against homeschooling when it is conducted by parents who are equipped to educate their children and simply prefer doing it themselves to leaving it to the school system. But I also believe that parents who homeschool their children to further their own religious agenda at the expense of teaching their children things that don’t fly with their particular doctrine, but that their children need to know regardless, are not really doing their kids any favors. Characters’ views of evangelical colleges do not necessarily reflect the author’s, either.
> 
> † The proper name for the tree is the Persian silk tree, though in the South we’re more likely to call it a mimosa tree. I chose to use the proper name instead of the more common (but incorrect) name for clarity’s sake.


End file.
